Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them

by Sallie Tisdale

  In 1786, the huge Les Innocents Cemetery of Paris was emptied, the bones and bodies and parts of bodies moved to the newly excavated catacombs. By then the ground was so saturated with corpses, with uncountable numbers of bodies festering in pits, that decomposition took place more or less in the open, and was often incomplete. The Church made a lot of money from burial fees and resisted government efforts to close the cemetery for many years, until the neighborhood was a wretched miasma and the basements of buildings began to collapse inward in piles of moldering carcasses. What an astonishing sight this spectacle of death must have been! For a long year—and, oh, it must have been a long year—Parisians were treated to nighttime caravans of rotting corpses carried through the city in carts. Enough fat was collected during the interment to make a good supply of candles and soap.

  You can get a grave for free in Germany and Belgium, but only for twenty years or so. After that, your relatives will need to rent the space for you. If they don’t, the remains are buried deeper or moved to a mass grave, and the site is used again. In London today, space for graves is so scarce that cemeteries have begun burying people under pathways and between existing graves. Both the government and the Church of England have warned people to expect graves to be reused—or, as the government likes to put it, “fully used”—after seventy-five years. At this point, there should be nothing left beyond a few bone fragments. The burial authorities can then open the grave to allow more burials in what is called the “lift and deepen” method: the remains are placed in a burlap sack to be reburied below the new coffin. Except for war graves, which are supposed to be kept in perpetuity, the maximum term for a grave is a hundred years. A loud minority is fighting the law in England. In Scotland, where a grave is called a lair, reuse is considered only after at least a hundred years, and only for a lair that appears abandoned. There was such resistance to reuse of graves in Sydney and Durban that efforts to do so were dropped. The problem is simply being pushed into the future.

  In a city like Cairo, untold numbers of people have been buried over an eon. Graves last a long time in Egypt’s dry climate, where the Cairo Necropolis stretches through the city for several miles. Millions of people are buried here in tombs and mausoleums of all sizes dating back to the seventh century AD. The graves are intact, but hundreds of thousands of people live among them and have for generations. Laundry hangs between the walls of tombs, children play inside the mausoleums, you can buy vegetables or get a shave next to a grave. Small homes have even been built in the narrow gaps. The necropolis is still active: people are still being buried there, while others are being born.

  Nirvana Asia Ltd. of Hong Kong is the “largest integrated bereavement care provider in Asia,” offering enormous and elaborate cemeteries in several countries. Nirvana combines graveyards, columbaria (air-conditioned, with “advanced laser lighting system and sound effect”), memorial tablet halls (with “dedicated chanting of mantra at scheduled times”), a “Baby Paradise” to help a child enter the afterlife freely, a burial ground carefully managed for maximum feng shui, and a cemetery for dogs and cats. But Hong Kong has been out of burial space for many years. Many people fulfill their responsibility to pay respects to dead ancestors by visiting a virtual grave; they can offer money or a roast pig by emoticon. Even public columbaria have a long waiting list now. A floating columbarium has been proposed to “offer serenity and breathtaking scenery with which inland sites can’t compete,” and the possibility of “sustained growth.”

  Space for graves is so scarce and expensive in Japan that large corporations may purchase a section of a cemetery and offer a site as an employee benefit. Japan also has webcams at several cemeteries, and you can subscribe to an online service to visit the virtual grave and use icons to offer flowers, fruit, and incense, a ladle of water or a glass of beer. A multistory columbarium retrieves individual urns robotically with the insertion of a key card. The Ruriden columbarium in Tokyo has 2,046 small altar niches in the walls of a quiet, dark room. Each holds a crystal Buddha statue illuminated with LED lights in different colors, representing a different drawer of ashes. When a person swipes their ID card, the appropriate statue lights up and blinks. This is not a cheap solution: a box for one person costs more than $6,000, and a small maintenance fee is required every year.

  The main issue around the world is a lack of space. It has driven cemeteries up steep hills, into caves, and into the sky. Vertical cemeteries exist in several countries, the tallest being Brazil’s Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos: fourteen stories tall, with twenty-five thousand burial units. The Necrópole is one of Santos’s most popular tourist sites, with a snack bar on the roof and peacocks in the garden. This is not a cost-effective burial: even a three-year rental can cost tens of thousands of dollars here. The higher stories, with good views of the city, cost more. The three-year period reflects the typical decomposition time, after which families often have the remains removed to a cheaper, less advantageous unit.

  The word cemetery comes from a Greek word for a sleeping place.

  Shortly after Kyogen died, several of us bathed and dressed him at the hospital. We waited through the day in the hallucinatory clarity of loss. Finally, long after dark, we called the tissue donor service to take him away, many of us helping to slide the stiff, pale body into a thick black bag. Zipping it shut.

  At the funeral home three days later, his body came out of the refrigerator in a plastic coverall meant to catch leaking fluids. The limbs were soft and ragged where bones had been removed. His chest was sunken from the removal of the heart valves. The skin felt like damp wax. We had to dress him in a white funeral kimono over the coverall. As we rolled and pulled and tugged, the body gurgled and sighed, and the room was perfumed with odd smells. For a moment I felt one with every broken human being consigned to struggle with the fact of change: the immeasurable wonder and disaster of change. We billions, who love and cry and try to understand.

  Do not turn away.

  In time, the same thing happens to all bodies, no matter what we do. Embalmed bodies decompose, just more slowly and in a different pattern. Insects don’t seem to like formaldehyde much, and will focus on the parts of the body with the least chemical saturation. This is often the buttocks. Decomposition rates vary with season, temperature, moisture, the quality of the soil, the depth of the burial, the kind of casket, and other factors, but insects and animals usually make short work of things. A buried body may take years. Cremation is just a kind of very fast decomposition. The results are more or less the same.

  Maggots can reduce the weight of an exposed human body by 50 percent in a few weeks. There are several waves of insects in a decomposing body, colonizing in a strict sequence. The first wave is blowflies and houseflies of certain species; they begin to arrive within minutes of death. Their bodies are beautiful and glass-like, shimmering greens and blues with warm, deep-red eyes. They lay eggs in dark, warm corners and the larvae quickly hatch and begin to eat. A dead body is alive in a new way, a busy place full of activity. At times the body seems to move of its own accord from their motion.

  Eventually, other species of blowflies and houseflies arrive. The corpse begins to blacken and soften. (Corpses at this stage are called “wet carrion” by biologists.) The meat on which the maggots feed begins to liquefy and runs like melting butter. “We here witness the transfusion of one animal into another,” the great entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre wrote. By the time these larvae have fallen off into the soil to pupate, a third wave of flies arrives: fruit flies and drone flies and others, flies that prefer the liquids. Toward the end, the cheese skipper appears and carefully cleans the bones of the remnants of tendons and connective tissue.

  In Seattle, an interdisciplinary team is doing research into the ultimate natural burial, the eventual result of all burials made into a social choice: compost. Recompose (formerly called the Urban Death Project) is a public benefit corporation in partnership with several universities, foundations, architec
ts, soil scientists, and lawyers. A two-year pilot project involving six cadavers showed proof of concept: in the proper mix of materials, oxygenation, and moisture, the bodies completely decomposed in five to eight months. A larger pilot project at the University of Washington’s Pullman campus began in the fall of 2017. This phase is intended to answer questions about pathogens, heavy metals, controls, and seasonal variations. So many people are interested in donating their body to this project that the organization has had to limit donations to people reasonably expected to die during the next year of research.

  As the method is perfected, the organization will move toward building a prototype building and creating legal language for legislation. The goal is a large-scale system in which cities could receive and manage bodies in a formal, almost ritualized way, and recover fertile soil for use in parks and landscapes. The company uses the term recomposition, and writes cheerfully of people being “recomposed”—which is what actually happens, what happens to every one of us whether we agree or not. We are decomposed, compounded, dissolved, disappearing, reappearing; the air takes a piece from here and the soil a fleck from there. That speck of memory, released into this carbon atom and that drop of water, runs into the earth. A little protein, a bit of sugar, a pinch of wisdom, hard gained: it all softens and combines until new life is made from pieces of the past.

  The idea of knowing that I could become compost, could be truly used after death, is deeply satisfying. I contemplate my ordinary, imperfect, beloved body. I contemplate the bodies of my beloveds: individual, singular, unique, irreplaceable people, their skin and eyes and mouths and hands. I consider their skin riddled and bristling with that seething billow of maggots. I consider the digestion of their eyes and the liquefaction of those hands (my hands, my eyes), the rending of flesh and muscle by beak and claw. The evolution of the person into the thing, into meat and wet carrion and eventually into a puddle, into new flies, into earth and root. What better vision of the fullness of birth and the fullness of death than the maggot and the carrion eater? “Placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike,” wrote Fabre. “There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.” Even the Buddha: they came and turned him into juice and soil, and the Buddha flowed gloriously like cream into the ground.

  More than half of India’s population lives within a few hundred miles of the river Ganges—Ganga, the Mother. In Varanasi, a stretch of riverbank several miles long is divided into more than a hundred ghats, broad staircases that lead to the water, each ghat the plaza of a miniature neighborhood, catering to different needs. People bathe at dawn every day, reciting prayers. They come to do laundry, to visit, to make offerings, to flirt, to get a shave and haircut, buy fruit, commit crimes, gossip, sell betel, ride a ferry. People fall in love along the river, smoke, play cards, meet friends. There are always people here, and always wandering cows and feral dogs and rowboats and ferries slowly sliding by.

  The first time I came to Varanasi, I walked the entire length of the ghats over the course of several days. The boatmen lounged against the pilings, their agents calmly patrolling the crowds: “Madam, boat?” “Boat, Madam?” “Boat?” Boats could be had at any spot along the way, for an hour or a day, to go up or go down, to cross the river to the floodplain where people buy chips, splash in the shallows, or rent horses for a holiday ride. Boat prices are open to negotiation, varying with the current, the weather, the time of day, and the boatman’s mood. Many seem to hope that negotiations will fail.

  People come to the Ganges to die, because, in Hindu belief, to be cremated by the Ganges is to be released all at once from the cycle of suffering and reincarnation. (Certain people do not need to be cremated, such as unwed girls. They need merely to be sunk into the holy river.) The two burning ghats, as they are called, are hard to miss; a fog of smoke hovers over each of them. “Boat, Madam?” is sometimes followed by “See the burning ghat?” The cremations are popular with tourists.

  Some people watch from boats because visitors are not entirely welcomed on the burning ghat itself and photographs are forbidden. Occasionally a local will try to shoo the casual observer along, but the ghats are always crowded with sightseers, Indian and foreign both. The main one is surrounded by enormous towering constructions of firewood as tall as multistory buildings and smells of heavy, oily smoke. The sites are never still; there are always fires burning, perhaps a dozen or more at a time, each built on the ashes of previous fires so that the entire plaza has become a pillow of ash, fine dust floating up with every step. In a hot city, this is the hottest place, oven heat rolling in waves across the steps and along the walkways between the columns of wood. For all of the watchers and the endless burning, it is quiet: the crackling of fire, the thud of falling wood, the murmured prayers.

  Men work around the clock, building and tending and stirring fires. Here a dying fire, there a body fully engulfed, a blackened skull facing the sky. Now and then, dry-eyed mourners carry a body wrapped in cloth and draped in chrysanthemums down to the water, trailed by the eldest son. He steps awkwardly over the ash, wearing only a loincloth, his head newly shaved and looking like he’d really like to get back to work at the bank. The body is dipped into the water. While it dries, the family purchases firewood and the pyre is built. Then the body is laid on top, and in a matter of moments the flames begin to rise. The fire will burn for hours. I sit for a long time on the steps, taking notes in a small book, my camera and phone carefully hidden. I turn away several young men who try to hit me up for donations to a fake hospice nearby. A small dog pads around, pawing at the ash. I watch a blackened body surrounded by flames that are almost transparent against the bright day. A leg is sticking out of the burning shroud, slowly shrinking in the flame until suddenly the foot falls off and rolls to the side. A fire tender pushes it back into the flames with a stick.

  Cremation is one of the most common methods for disposing of a corpse in the world. Almost everyone in Japan is cremated. There are thousands of crematories in China, more than a thousand in Europe. Throughout India and Nepal, seven million people are burned on open pyres every year. In 2016, more than half of Americans who died were cremated. Cremation is cheaper than a traditional burial, and some people want to be free of the funeral home folderol. The vocabulary of coffins is protection, defense, peace of mind. The language of cremation is affordability, simplicity, ease.

  Don’t try this at home. A cremation oven runs as hot as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Few bonfires reach the temperatures needed. The human body is wet, a loose collection of watery cells, about 85 percent moisture. In the oven, the coffin or shroud burns away first. The intense heat quickly evaporates the body’s water and the suddenly dry skin and hair ignite. Everything soft chars, shrivels, and burns away. The abdomen may swell and burst. On occasion, the chamber has to be opened to reposition the body for a more thorough burn. Metal may melt but not combust: gold fillings, jewelry, the rods and pins of a rebuilt femur. Gradually the skeleton is exposed, cooking until the bones are friable and begin to crumble. At the end of cremation, about 5 percent of the body is left.

  Perhaps one day we will collectively throw up our hands and decide cremation is just too dirty. Crematoria are considered incinerators, in the same category as municipal waste and hazardous waste incinerators. The cremation of an average adult requires more than two million BTU an hour of energy. (To compare, a gallon of gasoline provides about 124,000 BTU.) The pyres of India and Nepal use up more than fifty million trees every year and create a significant fraction of the particulate pollution of this very polluted region. Cremation releases a number of dangerous compounds into the atmosphere along with greenhouse gases. Mercury from dental fillings is vaporized in cremation and released in significant amounts, and mercury has been shown to accumulate in soil near crematoria. Quantities of persistent toxic chemicals known as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (
PCDFs) are also released. The real environmental effects have been little studied by any government, but a few limited surveys in England showed increased birth defects and stillbirths in the vicinity of crematoria.

  Despite the many costs, for a grieving person cremation can have a kind of stark beauty. George Bernard Shaw watched his mother’s body enter the crematorium, feet-first. “The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet colored lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like pentecostal tongues,” he wrote, “and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.” If you pay attention, burning has a blunt impact that is hard to deny.

  A few days after Kyogen died, after he became a donor and we dressed his body in the formal white kimono, hundreds of people processed around the open cardboard casket. Then the casket was sealed, and the people who had been closest to him walked the coffin across the parking lot into the crematorium and pushed it into the oven. His widow pushed a red button, and the flames came on in a great whoosh of sound. As I walked to my car, I glanced up at the crematorium chimney. I couldn’t see the smoke in the sun-bright sky. But, looking down, I saw its shadow dancing and wavering across the asphalt.

  The next day a few of us returned to sort through the bones, saved for us in a big metal tray. The tray lay on top of the crushing machine used to turn leftover bone into ash, the coarse material known as cremains that are typically put in an urn and given to the family. But you can have the bones. Bones are not smooth. They are notched and grooved, and each notch means something, represents a piece of the life. The furrows of bones show us where things attached, how the body was woven into one. These bones were cocooned in muscle, nerve, and blood; they were leverage and core. This bone held weight, all the weight of the body, and ran and jumped and rolled. This bone gave form to the delicate tendons of the hand. This bone protected the heart, the liver, the lungs. This bone defended the brain. These are warriors, these bones. They are good to see. Kyogen’s bones were friable but easy to recognize, and we could fit a few together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: vertebrae, part of the pelvis, small bones from the fingers, pieces of rib, a segment of skull. I keep several small pieces in a box. Memento mori. Remember, you will die.